I'm David Rosenthal, and this is a place to discuss the work I'm doing in Digital Preservation.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

James Jacobs on Looking Forward

Government documents have long been a field that the LOCKSS Program has been involved in. Recent history, such as that of the Harper administration in Canada, is full of examples of Winston Smith style history editing by governments. This makes it essential that copies of government documents are maintained outside direct government custody, and several private LOCKSS networks are doing this for various kinds of government documents. Below the fold, a look at the US Federal Depository Library Program, which has been doing this in the paper world for a long time, and the state of its gradual transition to the digital world.
Stanford Library's government documents specialist James Jacobs and his colleague Jim Jacobs have a must-read post at Free Government Information entitled Looking Backward, Looking Forward which uses two examples to contrast the backwards- and forwards-looking views of digital preservation as applied to government documents:

Example 1: Depositing objects not information
The Superintendent Of Documents policy for Dissemination and Distribution (SOD 301)
explicitly limits what GPO will deposit into depository libraries to
so-called “tangible” products. This policy can be judged a success only
by looking backwards and evaluating it in terms of how well it adheres to old methods
— continuing to send physical objects to depository libraries. By
Looking Backwards and focusing on methods, depositing floppy disks or
DVDs (a tiny improvement) seems like progress.

But the policy is a failure if we evaluate its outcomes. To
evaluate the policy by Looking Forward we would ask if the outcomes of
the policy match the long-term goals of the FDLP — not if the methods
have remained unchanged. We would ask if the policy ensures the
long-term preservation of digital government information and ensures
that it can be accessible and usable in the future (in fact, this
question should be asked of every policy decision!). Sadly, we
know from experience that this policy has resulted in undesirable,
counter-productive outcomes. It has complicated, inhibited, and in some
cases prevented preservation and long-term access.

Example 2: Digitizing Backwards
Although we at FGI have long supported digitization,
there is one aspect of digitization (particularly mass-digitization)
that we do find troubling and it provides another example of Looking
Backward. We believe that it is only by Looking Backwards that many of
our mass digitization projects seem even marginally acceptable. When we
compare having any digital access to having no digital
access, we are comparing the present to the past; we are Looking
Backward. Viewed that way, even lousy, incomplete, inaccurate
digitizations — and the equally incomplete and inaccurate metadata
describing them — seem like an improvement. You can tell when someone is
Looking Backwards when they say they are going to digitize on-the-cheap
and the results will be “good enough.”

Digitizing Backwards is digitizing by comparing the digital objects we
create to their paper originals. Instead of this, we should Look Forward
when we digitize and create digital objects that stand up to current
and future expectations of our user communities. Digitizing Backwards
has produced digital objects that already fall short of users’ expectations in many ways.

Designated Community: An identified group of potential
Consumers who should be able to understand a particular set of
information. The Designated Community may be composed of multiple user
communities. A Designated Community is defined by the Archive and this
definition may change over time.

Another way of expressing James' "Looking Forwards" is as taking the needs of the Designated Community into account in designing preservation processes.